Site Mobile Navigation

Germany Investigating Facebook Tagging Feature

BERLIN — A German regulator said Wednesday that he had asked Facebook to disable its new photo-tagging software, saying he was concerned that its facial recognition feature amounted to the unauthorized collection of data on individuals.

Johannes Caspar, the data protection supervisor in Hamburg, who has been aggressive in investigating the online practices of companies like Google and Apple, warned that the feature could violate European privacy laws.

The software, called “suggested automatic tagging,” lets Facebook users assign digital name tags to people in their photographs. Photos that are uploaded later are scanned for physical features and can be tagged and stored.

In a letter sent Tuesday, Mr. Caspar said he had asked Facebook to disable the feature in Germany and respond in two weeks to his concerns. Under German law, the regulator could fine Facebook, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., up to 300,000 euros ($429,000).

Mr. Caspar also confirmed that the European Commission’s data privacy advisory panel would determine whether tagging itself violated a user’s privacy. Mr. Caspar said he was coordinating his investigation with Jacob Kohnstamm, the chairman of the panel and the Dutch data protection authority.

Through a spokesman, Facebook rejected the regulator’s claim, saying the tagging feature, which gives the person in the photograph the final right to accept, reject or remove a tag, conforms with the European privacy law.

“We will consider the points the Hamburg Data Protection Authority have made about the photo tag suggest feature but firmly reject any claim that we are not meeting our obligations under European Union data protection law,” said a Facebook spokesman in Berlin.

The dispute is the latest between leading American technology companies and European privacy regulators, especially in Germany, over the privacy ramifications raised by social networking, online mapping and location services tied to mobile advertising.

Last year, Google apologized to privacy officials around the world, and paid some fines, after it was revealed that Google’s roving Street View mapping vehicles were also collecting private data from unencrypted Wi-Fi routers.

Google attributed the systematic, unauthorized collection of individual data to a programmer’s error.

Apple, the maker of the iPhone, came under scrutiny in April in Germany after a computer expert revealed that the iPhone was compiling logs of user locations. The inquiry, which was led by privacy officials in Bavaria, was closed in June after Apple agreed to redesign the feature to address German privacy concerns, said Thomas Kranig, the head of the Bavarian data protection agency.

Mr. Kranig, in an interview, said Apple had attributed the unauthorized data collection to a programmer’s error and had redesigned iPhone software to give Germans the option to allow collection of location data.

In July 2010, Mr. Caspar started an investigation into Facebook over its Friends Finder feature, which allows Facebook to copy names and details from a user’s e-mail address book to find friends who are also on Facebook. Mr. Caspar said Facebook, besides finding friends, was also identifying non-Facebook users culled from the lists with solicitations to join its network.

That inquiry was closed, Mr. Caspar said, after Facebook agreed to change the Friends Finder application to let anyone contacted through the function decide in advance whether their data could be used by Facebook.

Despite its run-ins with privacy officials, Facebook has grown in Germany, where it has more than 20 million users who log in at least once a month.

Mr. Caspar said Tuesday that Facebook had built an archive of more than 75 billion photos, and 450 million people have been tagged worldwide.

The Facebook representative in Berlin said Facebook did not permanently store data on individual faces, but could not say how long Facebook kept the data.

A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2011, on page B4 of the National edition with the headline: Germany Investigates Facebook Tagging. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe